Subconscious design

Two systems

The concept of two system that handle how we work as human beings keeps popping up in different research. Lieberman in his book “human learning and memory”¹ talks about different journals³ and research that brings up two systems of learning. That we automatically learn things in some situations and in other situations we seem to have more control over what and how we learn.

Other research on two systems is more oriented towards behavior science. David Kahneman is a noble price winner in economics. His researches lead to a whole new field that’s called behavior economics. He talked about how the two systems explain how we behave in different ways.

System one could be explained to be our subconscious. This is doing all present thinking, all the processes that make us work as human being that we don´t think about consciously. Our conscious thoughts are defined as system two. In the book² “thinking, fast and slow” David Kaneman talks about different characteristics of the systems.

“System 1: Operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2: allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration”

David Kahneman have an example of how system 1 operates without us knowing. “…The two picture above where showed to people lying in a brain scan. Each picture was shown for less than 2/100 of a second and immediately masked by “visual noise,” a random display of dark and bright squares. None of the observers ever consciously knew that he had seen pictures of eyes, but one part of their brain evidently knew: the amygdala, which has a primary role as the “threat center” of the brain, although it is also activated in other emotional states. Images of the brain showed an intense response of the amygdala to a threatening picture that the viewer did not recognize “

Implementing the subconscious design

 

Our only enemy has an attack behavior that first visualizes the area it will do damage in and then does the damage. This lets the player react to the attack with its teleport mechanic. What we work on now is to implement this behavior to a rhythm that looks like this:

T1 is the time for the enemy’s laser. T2 is the time it takes for the black circle which indicate where the attack will do damage appears. T3 is time it takes before damage is dealt in the black circle at the end of T3. Then the enemy moves for 2 beats before repeating it´s pattern. As you can see, this is a four-beat rhythm.

It´s easy to see that when the expanding red circle end it´s time (t3) you will take damage. You make a conscious decision with system two to connect that when the red circle reaches max it will cause damage. Maybe your thought process the first time you see the attack is “Aah, so when the red circle reaches max it does damage, I shall avoid that next time”.

While you play our game, you will also notice subconsciously that the enemy behave in a rhythm.  Your system one will finetune your behavior to not die in the game. Slowly you will adapt your behavior to the rhythm.

The shooting mechanic and the rhythm are the two mechanics that work together to form the behavior of our only enemy. The visual effects for the attack leans more towards design for system two and the rhythm mechanic leans more towards design for system one.

This adds more depth to the game. First you will use your system two to figure out the rules of the game. Then you start to finetune your behavior to clear the goal you set up inside the game rules. You try out the mechanics and how you should use them for the most benefit. This includes you subconsciously adapting your behavior to the rhythm. My hope is that this leads to more complex thinking but still give simple rules to the player.

Thanks for reading : )

 

Ps. I know the rhythm picture is not that good but… you know.

 

¹Lieberman, D. (2011). Human learning and memory. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

²Kahneman, D. (2015). Thinking, fast and slow. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

³McClure, S. (2004). Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards. Science, 306(5695), pp.503-507.

 

Planning fallacy

 

 

This post I will dedicate to the meeting where we discuss what we were going to focus on for the rest of the project. I will go through Daniel Kahneman concept of Planning Fallacy. Because of the knowledge of the Planning Fallacy we end up of not implementing anything new to the game even though we come far with the game we have. Instead we want to focus on the communicating and refining the component we have in our game right now.

In the discussion, we were thinking and almost did implement another enemy.  We counted the weeks we had left and went through the things we wanted to implement. We were just managing to implement what we had left with the weeks we had. This included a second enemy. Now we had to decide if we should implement the new enemy or not.

If you read Clinton Keith book Agile game development with scrum he says you should multiply the time you think it will take by two. If you are new to scrum, you probably should multiply by three. With this outside view on our project we should defiantly not add anything to the game. Even though we thought that we really could implement a new enemy. Why is it that? Why do we think we can do much more then what the outside perspective says we can (In this case the scrum book)? Daniel Kahneman have coin the concept Planning Fallacy.

 

For explaining the Planning fallacy, you first need to know about WYSIATI (Yes, that is the name).  The WYSIATI is a concept of how we form decisions in the moment. When you making a decision, your brain do a search in your brain for the accessions that you remember from before that match the decision you want to make in the moment.

For example, if you think of choosing a pizza while looking at an ordering board. You probably going to remember how a juicy taste of you last pizza. When you compare with the price you probably will look at the other prices on the pizzaboard, maybe you see a 50kr under the pizza you want order and the pizza you thinking about cost 70kr. When you make the decision if you going to buy the pizza or not, you think the price is 40% expansive because of the price under your pizza and you really want a pizza, because you remember the taste. That is the two factors you base your decisions on, even though they not at all make sense to only use those variables.

You could think about what you budget is for this month and how 70kr match how much you can spend on food this day. Note that you make this decision all the time. Daniel Kahneman names the two perspective the inside view and the outside view. The inside view is when you look at the

 

In our case when we planned if we going to implement the next enemy. We were positive that we could implement it. Because we only see what we just implement to our game. The outside view here is Clinton Keith Book, that states that you properly need a lot more time then you think, even triple the amount. That perspective is the outside perspective. Because of WYSIATI you are drawn to make decision on your inside perspective. Even though the outside perspective is properly much more reliable source. I am glad that we knew this and made the decisions that did.

 

Ps. I want to make a note that there is more than just the WYIATI effect happening when you decide.

 

 

Reward contridictions

Combo System

For our shoot em up we have a combo mechanic. Right now if you kill an enemy they shoot out a “combo Object”. You as a player may try to shoot it and if you hit you get combo increase in combo Level. The combo Level makes you do more damage. If you miss the combo objected you combo level will resets. The thought process is that you going to kill an enemy to get stronger and kill enemies faster. This makes it fly out more combo object at the same time, which makes it hard to actually hit the combo objects with your shoot before the leaves the screen and reset you combo. This gives the player a feeling of reward to their action and development while raising the stakes.

 

The problem

The problem with this was that it takes time to shoot the combo object. This led to a conflict of feedback. You reward the player with the power up to kill enemies faster but to maintain that you need to destroy the combo object. Witch flies out every time an enemy dies. Instead of feeling empowerment of the combo level and kill enemies faster you spend most of the time trying to hit combo objects. This contradicts the purpose of the combo system.

 

Possible solutions

First solution we discuss in the group is to change so that the combo mechanics drops rate. This will make the combo Objects stick out and not feel like it´s a reward itself if an enemy drops a combo object, instead of being a part of the enemy.

Another solution could be that you shoot faster and maybe around you 360 degrees. This would make the player to shoot combo object and enemies at the same time instead of now that you need to put “a lot” of time focusing on killing the combo object.

What I think is the key is to reward the player so it don´t contradict each other. Either, it need to feel the empowerment of doing more damage with an increase in combo level. But still feel like that the stakes are rising when you advance.

PS. Sorry for the green color on my picture, but i just want to see the world burn.